Our Team

Meet Our Team

Terms of Reference

Director

Susan Kirkland, PhD
AIRN Director

Susan is a Professor and Interim Head/Chief in the Department of Community Health and Epidemiology at Dalhousie University. An epidemiologist by training, she has extensive experience in communicable and chronic disease epidemiology. She has a lengthy record of research funding, holding numerous research grants using quantitative and qualitative methodologies to investigate the development and consequences of HIV, hepatitis C, STIs, and injection drug use and to elucidate the social determinants of health and the health service needs of marginalized populations. She has a long history of leading large interdisciplinary, inter-sectoral research teams, as Director of AIRN, as a co-Principal Investigator on REACH, and as one of three Principal Investigators on the landmark Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA). Dr. Kirkland has been involved in numerous studies examining barriers and facilitators to HIV and HCV treatment and services including medication costs and primary care models of service for MMT. She is also involved with national and international teams investigating HIV and aging and the role of frailty and HIV.

Staff

Caroline Ploem, MA
AIRN/REACH Atlantic Research Manager

Caroline began in December 2015 as the Atlantic Research Manager for AIRN and the CIHR CBR Collaborative. Caroline’s greatest passions are related to harm reduction, social justice and health equity. Her educational background is in Applied Psychology and she has more than 20 years experience in health-related program planning, management and evaluation. She spent more than a decade as Executive Director of a provincial non-profit organization aimed primarily at enhancing the capacity of health promoters to work collaboratively toward health equity and social justice. Prior to this, she dedicated most of her earlier career (1990-2004) to the field of HIV/AIDS-related research, focusing much of her work on the prevention of HIV/AIDS and HCV among vulnerable populations, particularly people who use drugs and people in prison.